NEW HAPPENINGS IN ISRAEL ... Florentin and "The 10 things I learned about Tel Aviv's hippest neighborhood"! Discribed as Israel's "Venice Beach", Florentin is a patch of warehouses, workshops, bakeries and bars, bravely holding its ground between Tel Aviv's ritsy Neve Tzedek quarter and the incorporated Arab port town of Jaffa to the south. Florentin has been shifting from working class to artist class for over a decade now. A French urban planner recently wrote that Florentin is "A key space where one can observe and decipher how globalization impacts on the daily-life scale and banel forms of identification and territorial appropriation" (!!) What ever that means. I think it's just a really cool place in Israel to spend some time. You will as well.